Robert T.
McMaster grew up in Southbridge, Massachusetts, a New
England mill town. He holds a B.A. from Clark
University and graduate degrees from Boston College,
Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts. He
taught biology at Holyoke Community College in
Massachusetts from 1994 to 2014.His parents'
reminiscences of growing up in early 20th century
America were the inspiration for his first three
novels, Trolley Days (2012), The Dyeing
Room (2014), and Noah's Raven.

Robert W.
McMaster - 1928

RWM and RTM
- 1950

IN THE AUTHOR'S OWN WORDS

THE DAYS OF TROLLEYS

"Of all my father's stories of his
childhood, I was most fascinated by those
about the trolleys that ran up and down the
streets of Southbridge. In
summer when the open-sided 'breezer' cars
were operating, he and his friends
would run along behind a moving car, jump
aboard, and enjoy a free ride. It was
strictly forbidden, of course, but that
didn't seem to matter."

OF DEATH AND DYEING

"Memories of my own childhood have also been
incorporated into my books. One experience in
particular, a brief visit to the dyehouse of a still
operational woolen mill in Putnam, Connecticut, in
the nineteen-sixties, left an indelible impression
on me that inspired the writing of The Dyeing
Room nearly fifty years later."

THE FRENCH CONNECTION

"Since the late
nineteenth century, Southbridge, Massachusetts,
has been home to one of the largest concentrations of people of
French-Canadian descent in the United States,
numbering some 60% of the town's population in
1900. Fifty years later, when I was a boy, the
town's Québécois heritage was still
very much in evidence. French was commonly spoken
in shops on Main Street; the surname Proulx far outnumbered Smith and
Jones in the telephone directory; Mass
was still said in French at Notre Dame Cathedral;
and instruction in French was still provided at
Notre Dame Elementary School and High
School.

The struggle of newly-arrived French-Canadians to
preserve their culture, language, and faith in
the midst of the secular, pluralistic society
of a New England city is an important story in
our nation's history, one that has not been
very widely explored in American historical
fiction."

South-eastern view of the
central part of Southbridgefrom Historical Collections by
John Warner Barber (1841)

FOOTPATH IN THE
FOREST

"I taught biology at Holyoke Community
College for nearly 20 years. Every semester
I took my students on hikes in the forest
adjacent to the campus along a network of mostly narrow,
winding trails. But one trail was different
from the rest, too wide and well-graded to
be a mere footpath in the forest. A little
research revealed the fascinating story of
that trail - it was actually the
right-of-way of an 'interurban' trolley line that ran between
Holyoke and Westfield in the early 20th
century. As I told my students about how
that line allowed workers, shoppers, even
students of that era, to commute between
Westfield and Holyoke, the characters and
stories in my books began coming to life in
my imagination."